Charlie Gerard's Overgrown, a Chrome extension, grows vines over tabs you ignore, and past 5% overgrowth you can't click the page until you hack them back with a machete, chainsaw or flamethrower

“I’m writing this on a new computer so I currently ‘only’ have 22 tabs open but 14 of them are already completely overgrown,” Charlie Gerard (@devdevcharlie) admits at the bottom of her write-up.

The idea came from a word. Gerard was doing a creative exercise around “Overgrowth,” and her first thought was The Walking Dead and The Last of Us, where plants swallow abandoned buildings. Then “the word ‘abandoned’ made me think of my browser tabs.”

So every tab gets what she calls a neglect clock. It runs while the tab is out of view and stops while you’re looking at it. The code is about as literal as it gets: when Chrome reports the page as hidden, it stamps the time, and when you come back, it adds the gap to the tab’s total.

The longer that total grows, the more vines creep in “from the edges towards the middle.” Past 5%, “the page behind the vines is walled off: you can scroll, but you can’t click, select or drag anything.” Scrolling still works, so you can read the article you forgot about, but you can’t press a button or fill in a field on it.

Getting it back means dragging your mouse across the plants. Clear it down to 5% and “the last bits fall off.” The weapon picker is a real setting, and each one has its own synthesized sound in the code, down to a chainsaw engine that revs with how fast you swing. By default a tab takes 24 hours to go fully green, and the popup lets you shorten that to as little as 5 minutes, if you want your browser to feel like a jungle by lunch.

She considered something meaner. “Originally, I was thinking about blocking users from closing their overgrown tabs until they slash all plants, but I thought it would be too annoying.”

Gerard doesn’t pretend it fixes anything. “It won’t necessarily make me read my tabs more but it’s ok,” she writes. Installing it takes Developer mode and Load unpacked from the repo’s dist folder, since there’s no Chrome Web Store listing, and the repo carries no license file yet. Whether she adds the close-blocking mode after all is still open.

Browsers have spent years making tabs cheaper to keep. Chrome, Edge and Safari all sleep, freeze or discard the ones you aren’t using, so a thousand open tabs costs little memory. Overgrown charges for every neglected one in mouse swings, measured against a 24-hour clock.

The neglect clock is the reusable part. Any extension that knows how long a page has gone unseen can decide what that page deserves, whether that’s vines, a reminder, or an automatic bookmark-and-close.